Temper Tantrum Tuesday: Kids and Guns in the Global Economy

My wife and I thought about having a kid recently but here in America the costs of medical care through pregnancy is between $25,000 and $30,000. I didn’t care as that would just be added to my debts just like the yearly interest of roughly the same amount. But my wife didn’t want that extra debt added on.

So I found this article very interesting, “Giving Birth outsourced to India” It turns out that for between $7,000 and $20,000 you can go over to India and a surrogate mother will have the pregnancy for you. This is cheaper than doing it the natural way over here in the US.

So for anywhere between one quarter and four-fifths of the cost of giving birth in the US you can have a mother in India do it for you. Not only are the cost savings significant but it also very labor saving. Instead of nine months of pregnancy it’s just a plane trip to India to drop off the sperm and eggs a nine-month wait and then a plane trip to pick up the kid. It’s about as easy a way to give birth as you can imagine.

There are a couple of little problems with this right now. First, the companies in India are voluntarily restricting this program to actual infertile couples. They don’t except couples that want to do it for economic reasons or just for the convenience. But it is unregulated so I’m sure they’ll loosen up and start having baby mills that will advertise the cost savings and convenience of doing it this way.

The second problem is they will probably want actual cash, not just do it and hope the person will pay. That’s where another news item caught my eye.

90% of the guns used in Mexico for the drug wars come from the US this has jacked up the prices of guns. Guns smuggled into Mexico have a profit of $250 to $350 per gun. Source. In Arizona a person can buy 15 guns without question, it’s only when you buy 16 or more that they ask if you plan to do more than hunt desert rats. So a middle-aged couple could stop by a gun shop, buy 30 guns, 15 each, and drive across the border and make a $7,500 profit. No one is going to question a middle-aged couple with no priors.

That’s enough to fund having a kid.

Thanks to the new global economy it is possible to get around the high cost of giving birth in the US. You just need to have no morals. Of course, none of this would be necessary if our healthcare costs were in line with the rest of the world.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Alien Thoughts